Awake by Sara Herlihy
Awake by Sara Herlihy As dawn breaks and my body stirs, my mind struggles to stay wrapped in your embrace. Warm breath tickles my face as soft lips caress it. Love and yearning penetrate my deepest layers. I never want to leave. A thousand years could pass but a minute would not be missed As […]
Attitude: Don Juan in the Shopping Mall by S. K. Kelen
Attitude: Don Juan in the Shopping Mall by S. K. Kelen Let us fly to bounty land…Aqua I Today’s Don Juan could be any of a million characters: Mohammed Hatim a wayward son of the Mujahideen, Doan Huan sporting a Da Nang pedigree, or Mario Lanza living out a serious fetish for muscle cars, Jim […]
Aspirations by SAAJIDA GORA
The essence of her soul lies within the purity of her heart The breath of her words illuminates a guiding path The voice of her aspiring dreams whispers subtle, compassionate beams The fluttering of her infinite love disperses through the smog filled air grappling through the unstable torrents Will it all be in despair? Poetry […]
ASHA APARTMENTS, 416, S.V. ROAD by Santosh Kumar Panda
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday Not Thursday Again Friday Not Saturday This time you disappeared on Thursday Saturday… was my… holiday Crossing the divider & using the long distance route for my destination I waited unknowingly going on in desperate Then here you come & checked me crossing the divider This is alone I look forward to […]
As if by Sara Herlihy
As if by Sara Herlihy Like a cloud Listless Hopeless Floating through a clear blue sky waiting… Just waiting… Until I evaporate and disappear. As if I never was. As if I didn’t impact the millions of eyes who saw my magnificent beauty grace their souls. As if I never was. I KNOW I was […]
Amity’s Death by SAAJIDA GORA
Woe is unto me Thou shalt never see. Despair, Despair, despair Viciously ripped, unaware Beams of amity like the essence of air Flowed smoothly through destined to share So precious, so pearly, so diamondly rare Velvety threads of gentle care Time has sought the light of th sun Time has sought the […]
America, America by Saadi Youssef
God save America, My home, sweet home! We are not hostages, America, and your soldiers are not God’s soldiers… We are the poor ones, ours is the earth of the drowned gods, the gods of bulls, the gods of fires, the gods of sorrows that intertwine clay and blood in a song… We are the […]
A Writer’s Pen by Sahiti Siddharth
A pen, when a writer holds A brand new chapter unfolds A few lines can make him the king It can make him fly on a single wing A writer without his pen Is like a leader without powers A writer without his pen Is like a garden without flowers A writer’s pen Makes him […]
A Traveller’s Guide to the East Indies by S. K. Kelen
A Traveller’s Guide to the East Indies by S. K. Kelen 1. To arrive anywhere tonight you travel a road lit only by fireflies to towns whose names really mean ‘tomb of a hundred martyrs’. Invisible birds sing tinkling vowels — words from a time before history invaded. Frogs roar louder and louder kick-starting a […]
A sense’s addiction to chocolate by SAAJIDA GORA
The sensual mouth’s craving desires are finding sweet addiction’s rapid fires, The enticing chocolate mounds of pure pleasure, melting in a fervent, passionate, river appealing rugged hazelnut mountains, swim in the oceans of chocolate fountains. Sensations so pure, desires so dreamy, A tantalizing taste, so eerily creamy. The earthy, nutty flavour splashing around, spreading sweet […]
A Father’s Hands by Scott Ransopher
A Father’s Hands by Scott Ransopher Men would bet upon her father’s hands. Could he pick up in just one fist A dozen eggs scattered on the table– One by one–cracking none? He’d reach his hand (stretched at five by Pulsing milk from freshened cows) And settle shells beneath knuckle’s crease. Then pressing oh so […]
The Unborn by Sharon Olds
The Unborn by Sharon Olds Sometimes I can almost see, around our heads, Like gnats around a streetlight in summer, The children we could have, The glimmer of them. Sometimes I feel them waiting, dozing In some antechamber; servants, half- Listening for the bell. Sometimes I see them lying like love letters In the Dead […]
The Space Heater by Sharon Olds
The Space Heater by Sharon Olds On the then-below-zero day, it was on, near the patients’ chair, the old heater kept by the analyst’s couch, at the end, like the infant’s headstone that was added near the foot of my father’s grave. And it was hot, with the almost laughing satire of a fire’s heat, […]
The Sash by Sharon Olds
The Sash by Sharon Olds The first ones were attached to my dress at the waist, one on either side, right at the point where hands could clasp you and pick you up, as if you were a hot squeeze bottle of tree syrup, and the sashes that emerged like axil buds from the angles […]
The Pact by Sharon Olds
The Pact by Sharon Olds We played dolls in that house where Father staggered with the Thanksgiving knife, where Mother wept at noon into her one ounce of cottage cheese, praying for the strength not to kill herself. We kneeled over the rubber bodies, gave them baths carefully, scrubbed their little orange hands, wrapped them […]
The Mortal One by Sharon Olds
The Mortal One by Sharon Olds Three months after he lies dead, that long yellow narrow body, not like Christ but like one of his saints, the naked ones in the paintings whose bodies are done in gilt, all knees and raw ribs, the ones who died of nettles, bile, the one who died roasted […]
The End by Sharon Olds
The End by Sharon Olds We decided to have the abortion, became killers together. The period that came changed nothing. They were dead, that young couple who had been for life. As we talked of it in bed, the crash was not a surprise. We went to the window, looked at the crushed cars and […]
The Daughter Goes To Camp by Sharon Olds
The Daughter Goes To Camp by Sharon Olds In the taxi alone, home from the airport, I could not believe you were gone. My palm kept creeping over the smooth plastic to find your strong meaty little hand and squeeze it, find your narrow thigh in the noble ribbing of the corduroy, straight and regular […]
The Clasp by Sharon Olds
The Clasp by Sharon Olds She was four, he was one, it was raining, we had colds, we had been in the apartment two weeks straight, I grabbed her to keep her from shoving him over on his face, again, and when I had her wrist in my grasp I compressed it, fiercely, for a […]
The Borders by Sharon Olds
The Borders by Sharon Olds To say that she came into me, from another world, is not true. Nothing comes into the universe and nothing leaves it. My mother—I mean my daughter did not enter me. She began to exist inside me—she appeared within me. And my mother did not enter me. When she lay […]
The Arrivals by Sharon Olds
The Arrivals by Sharon Olds I pull the bed slowly open, I open the lips of the bed, get the stack of fresh underpants out of the suitcase—peach, white, cherry, quince, pussy willow, I choose a color and put them on, I travel with the stack for the stack’s caress, dry and soft. I enter […]
Sex Without Love by Sharon Olds
Sex Without Love by Sharon Olds How do they do it, the ones who make love without love? Beautiful as dancers, gliding over each other like ice-skaters over the ice, fingers hooked inside each other’s bodies, faces red as steak, wine, wet as the children at birth whose mothers are going to give them away. […]
Primitive by Sharon Olds
Primitive by Sharon Olds I have heard about the civilized, the marriages run on talk, elegant and honest, rational. But you and I are savages. You come in with a bag, hold it out to me in silence. I know Moo Shu Pork when I smell it and understand the message: I have pleased you […]
One Year by Sharon Olds
One Year by Sharon Olds When I got to his marker, I sat on it, like sitting on the edge of someone’s bed and I rubbed the smooth, speckled granite. I took some tears from my jaw and neck and started to wash a corner of his stone. Then a black and amber ant ran […]
Crab by Sharon Olds
Crab by Sharon Olds When I eat crab, slide the rosy rubbery claw across my tongue I think of my mother. She’d drive down to the edge of the Bay, tiny woman in a huge car, she’d ask the crab-man to crack it for her. She’d stand and wait as the pliers broke those chalky […]
A Week Later by Sharon Olds
A Week Later by Sharon Olds A week later, I said to a friend: I don’t think I could ever write about it. Maybe in a year I could write something. There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school. And […]
1954 by Sharon Olds
1954 by Sharon Olds Then dirt scared me, because of the dirt he had put on her face. And her training bra scared me—the newspapers, morning and evening, kept saying it, training bra, as if the cups of it had been calling the breasts up—he buried her in it, perhaps he had never bothered to […]
Winter by Shaunna Harper
She does not thaw in summer, her iced skeleton a visceral display of sapphire veins and pulses bolting in shock to the outskirts of her shores, splayed like a victim. She is perpetual frost, crying sharp diamond tears that leave chips across hard flesh like braille, like fallen teeth from a corpse; the sun bores […]
Twilight by Shaunna Harper
A prayer lifts itself from my mouth between tight teeth and soft lips, grows wings, leaves like a moth by the window trying to find the moon, sings, as the moist earth cools below. As always, twilight has come too soon. Lifted by light like a Chinese lantern, I watch the night sink, its star […]
The Other Half by Shaunna Harper
The Other Half by Shaunna Harper Your lips are still on my lipstick. Your eyes are still on my eyeshadow brush. You’re still wearing my favourite shirt; go on, keep it, if you must. The bags you unpacked are under your eyes; see that drawing? It’s tattooed on your skin. All those lies I heard […]
Saison Noir by Shaunna Harper
Is that Christmas falling in your hair? I can taste your past lover’s countdown kiss, I can smell the coming year; it smells like this. I drink this season’s red wine serenade; drunken romance is bliss. Your light spots me through falling feathers and snow; the instruments pick themselves up, tangle, reminisce; the songs say […]
River by Shaunna Harper
River by Shaunna Harper You can’t tell a river which way to run. Trees flank his cerulean depths like soldiers, armed with sticks and leaves, ever-reaching, seizing, only to be swept aside. A river has no place to hide. He is never the same when he comes back; a little older, a little darker, carrying […]
Prelude by Shaunna Harper
Prelude by Shaunna Harper Our bed screams red, gutted, split, under weight of wonderings in my head; bruised like a throat, crushed by hungry lips, gaping like a wound, stunning. The walls are indented and cannot be mended, colour of your temper in blotchy black and blue, handprints sink between spine and sinew, hollow concave, […]
Passing by Shaunna Harper
They’ve strung up your face on canvas carved in glass across the city’s overpass. Your eyes are bulging mole-hills. Your hair is sprouting grass. In the backdrop of a cheap shop’s parking lot, a broken sign curls around your head like a halo; when winter comes you will sparkle with snow. Each fractured letter blinks […]
My Modern Surrealist Mind by Shaunna Harper
The beer has drowned itself in the cask; I’m pulling brown air for punters. The fridge is baring its teeth to my throat; its inner cold works wonders. I’m falling out of love with myself and rising into bad karma, slipping in circles into wrong holes, the maelstrom enfolding this drama. The house is talking […]
Metamorphosis by Shaunna Harper
We jumped from the night and fell into the moon upside down in fractured dreams. He told me if I could picture it, I could live it. Reality is a broad market. He came with golden eyes, silver lips, quilted with satin like the finest-dressed mannequin. His puppet fingers dealt a card; a blow, hard. […]
La Fleur by Shaunna Harper
La Fleur by Shaunna Harper Shower rain settles on fine hair like dew, dying sunlight a halo aglow casting darkness in me, light over you. The evening is drifting with falling snow, pooling smooth marble into your pores, beautifying your every mistake, making miracles of your flaws. Autumn breathes its rustic applause as leaves once […]
Keeping the Dawn by Shaunna Harper
Keeping the Dawn by Shaunna Harper My mind’s eye sweats a tear. Solitary, it runs to the mouth, as though dying for a taste of its own bitter fluid. The emotional effort is a waste. We watch like two friends as the hand scrawls its script, full stop bringing the final act to an end. […]
In Measures by Shaunna Harper
He sleeps in the hammock of a silken, silver scar that curls around my arm like a chain; a creature comfort, a ghostly appendage, finer than a spider’s web and visible only to me. This is where he lives. Where snow half-falls in unreachable diamonds, becoming hardened rain that wants to wound. Where the sun […]
Hidebound by Shaunna Harper
Lust, the most intimate season; short-lived, dissolving as ever into dust. The crest of a wave still rides the perpetual earth of our honeymoon, though the inner life of the stone erodes, suddenly not so sharp, tough like a dried-up heart. The memory loiters like a dangerous desire, but these days I no longer feel […]